New Starbucks Rewards Program Starts Today
The New Starbucks Rewards Program Starts NOW! Here’s all you need to know!
With this new rewards system, Starbucks Rewards Members will now earn 2 stars for every $1 spent using a registered gift card or the Starbucks app; and you can now redeem your points at different levels for various items!
- Redeem 25 Stars – Add an extra shot, flavor, or soy milk to your drink for free (up to $1 off beverage price)
- Redeem 50 Stars – Get any size hot brewed coffee, hot tea, or bakery item for free
- Redeem 150 Stars – Get any handcrafted beverage, parfait or breakfast item for free
- Redeem 200 Stars – Get a lunch sandwich, salad or protein box for free
- Redeem 400 Stars – Get packaged coffee or a single merchandise item for free (up to $20 value)
Although these changes do lower the amount of stars you need to redeem for a free plain coffee, you will now need MORE stars for free handcrafted beverages as mentioned above.
All other Starbucks Rewards items like free in-store brewed coffee or tea refills, and birthday freebies are still available.
Will existing rewards be grandfathered in or will you lose rewards?
If you reached Gold Level status before the program change, your entire Star balance should have carried over. For example, if you had 424 Stars in your account, those Stars should remain now that the program has changed. But you will now be able to redeem your Stars in a variety of ways like a mug for 400 stars, cookies for 50 stars each etc.
Are you looking forward to these Rewards Program changes? Here’s what some Hip2Save readers had to say in a recent post:
I’m disappointed 🙁 as it’s going to take 25 more stars for my favorite White Chocolate Mocha & 75 more to get a salad or sandwich.
I think I’m happy with this change as I always opted to go crazy and order something I wouldn’t normally or grab like an outrageously priced sandwich whereas I am perfectly content with a regular coffee & bakery item for 50 stars! Plus I don’t rack up stars as much as some people – I have 40 stars expiring next month – now I don’t have to stress as much about it.
Disappointing. Rewards programs always seem to tighten up over time and get worse over time. To move sandwiches and salads from 125 stars to 200. Wow. Huge increase. Probably the rewards program is factored into their product pricing too.
I’m not happy. My family uses the rewards in downtown Disney for free lunch. My kids and I take the monorail from Disneyland to Downtown Disney where they have a Starbucks that takes the rewards, they don’t inside Disneyland or California Adventures.
It will be interesting to see how soon/if they change it back because this will probably lose them a lot of business. Mine for one. It is cheaper to get coffee other places but because of the rewards I always kind of justified spending the extra to go to Starbucks. 🤷🏼♀️
Not happy. I always used my rewards on a big item. It was like getting a real deal!! And now 125 stars has been given a much lesser value… boo… just not going to be worth it anymore…
Disappointed. Yesterday I had 125 stars, enough to redeem for a handcrafted drink of my choice. Today, it’s not enough. They could have at least adjusted stars so users could still redeem for handcrafted beverages. Guess I should have stopped by yesterday. Thinking of contacting customer service to see if they’ll adjust stars as a courtesy
You had plenty of time to use this reward.
Some of us don’t go to Starbucks everyday
I’m with you Melanie. Had two freebies yesterday, now just have one and I’m a little disappointed by that. I was aware that the program would change today, but didn’t understand that I would lose what I already earned. I also get that you may not have had “plenty of time” to use your reward as you literally could have earned it yesterday and still not have it today.
I agree. Get over it for 25 measly stars!
How do you know that? Please be kind.
CS was able to adjust my account 😜.
I agree! I had two free drinks yesterday and a balance of 51 more stars. Now today I still have two free drinks but a balance of 1 star. I wish I had used them before this happened! I think we should flood customer service to add stars to our account to make up for it.
I kept seeing messages on the sbux app about this change coming. About 3 weeks ago at least. Then I asked about it when I went in store to find out when exactly it would change and they let me know:) so I could use my stars beforehand if I wanted to.
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Do we loose the stars we had before this rewards program?
No I still have all mine
Yes..according to the website only those who reached Gold prior to the change will keep their stars.
I didn’t realize the stars I had would disappear. I didn’t have that many but I am a little sad about that.
I just checked and I still have all of mine. You shouldn’t have lost any — maybe e-mail customer service to see if they can restore what you had, as it may have been a glitch.
If you weren’t a gold member, you should have lost your stars. I would contact CS anyway and see what they can do.
I’m actually happy about this, I almost have enough for a tumbler…. if you do the dashes it’s easy to get more stars. I’d rather get a tumbler since I never splurge on them but I get 3$ teas all the time. 20$ for 400 stars is more rewards for me than if I used them on free drinks.
Oooh! Then I’ll hold out for a free tumbler!
This message was at the bottom of the email I received yesterday, so maybe those that don’t see their stars will soon:
PS—Your account information may take a little longer than usual to update or be unavailable while we make these exciting changes. We thank you in advance for your patience.
All my points are gone and I had one more visit to get to 300. Very disappointing
Your stars should still be there
Might take a bit longer for them to appear. Customer service chat is my go to. They are very efficient with resolving an issue
Almost to gold status as I lost it because I was pregnant and wasn’t drinking caffeine and now all my stars are gone. 😥 VERY disappointing
Stars do have an expiration date, 6 months from the date earned. If you lost them, it wasn’t because of the new program going into effect.
Stars only started expiring once you reached gold.
Not sure about that. My sister was just the basic green level and she lost her stars twice. Only b/c she doesn’t go that often, maybe once a month. The first time it happened, she wasn’t even close to enough stars for a free drink. But last time she was a bit closer, like 90 or 100 stars and lost about half.
I am psyched! We don’t have very many Starbucks in my area, so it takes a while for me to earn stars, and I only ever use them for coffee or bakery items anyway.
Honestly this is the worse change for many of us, I had almost 13 rewards this morning only enough for 10 crafted drinks. Maybe it’s a lot to some but I actually spent a lot of money to get those for a rainy day or to gift to people in line. I tried using as many as I could in the last month
I’m pretty much done with Starbucks after the way they treated many of their employees at the Seattle corporate office. My daughter was working there and loved it, but after all the job cuts and reorganization she said it’s awful……now they have much lower employee morale and lots of those still employed are looking for jobs elsewhere.
I’ve been a gold member for over 15 years and have experienced this decrease in rewards twice before. It can’t be that Starbucks needs to do this because of decreasing profit. Their stock price has gone up 40% over the past year. So why are they screwing their loyal customers? It’s because they know they can do it and not lose any business. How many customers do you think they will lose this time? Probably very few. As for me, even though I’m complaining, I’ll continue on as before. So greed again wins out over loyalty. What we need is a good alternative to Starbucks. But for me there aren’t any. No chain coffee shops consistently produces a drinkable latte. And no local coffee shop around me does either. Until they have real competition Starbucks will continue to devalue their loyal customer.
I feel the same way. I have switched to WaWa’s handcrafted beverages. They are actually pretty good and a lot cheaper.
Way too often sbux can’t even make a drinkable latte! I’ve been complaining for years & yet the quality remains terribly inconsistent. When you get a good one, it tastes like perfection, but for some reason those are few & far between. For that reason I’ve changed to getting the espresso frappucino. For some reason it’s almost impossible to make that drink taste bad!
I’ve been a SBux Gold member for over 5 years now. I do like that we now have more reward alternatives. What I’m not fine with is the increase in stars for a handcrafted beverage. That, IMHO, should have stayed at 125 stars. The upcharges for a squirt of syrup & milk alternatives is ridiculous. Do I pay OOP or waste stars for those?
SBux is not the only game in my city, BUT their loyalty rewards is what keeps me going back. None of the other coffee shops offer rewards (and their prices are pretty in-line with SBux anyway, with one actually a tad more expensive)
So…$75 for a free latte. Bit much
Where did that math come from? $75 for a latte
I think they’re figuring you need to spend $75 to get enough stars for a free drink. Most of my stars come from menu challenges, the hopscotch games, double star days, receipt uploads for kcups purchases. So it was fairly easy for me to get stars for free drinks without actually spending $75.
I was not excited to see a change and I do wish they had left the 125 point for a free drink but I’ll adjust. I add to my points with the bonus star offers and take advantage of 50% off days for my decadent drinks. I despise their sandwiches so that won’t affect me at all. Thank you to Hip2Save for giving me advance notice that the change was coming so I could use points on my schedule rather than being surprised.
I bet we’re going to be seeing deals from Starbucks soon like “Buy $10, get $5” due to the fallout and get people to come in.
I’m actually happy with this change. I buy packaged coffee at Starbucks, so I rack up a lot of stars and will get better value out of them using them for free packaged coffee. My go-to drink is an Americano, which is one of the lower cost options, so the free drink was nice but not a huge value. At the end of the day, I drink and shop at Starbucks because I like their product. The rewards are a great perk, but they’re not a deal-breaker.
So people can complain about something a company does as a courtesy. They could just stop giving rewards all together people. You don’t shop at Walmart just to get rewarded. I go to Starbucks because they offer drinks I like better than other places in my area. I save up for it and yes the rewards are nice.
Yes it’s a courtesy. It’s a courtesy for loyalty. And they are reducing it at a time when their profits have increased astronomically. Which is their way of saying “we have so many customers so we don’t need loyalty”. Another reduction in courtesy will be coming soon.
I might be the only one but I am happy. Got my free venti coffee with extra heavy cream for only 50 stars instead of 125 today!!!
Nice change, I have an espresso machine at home and get Starbucks only when I’m in the run so their brewed coffee with half and half does the job for me, nice to be able to get it for 50 points.
Very excited to be able to get a tumbler for 400 stars! I use a tumbler at Starbucks every day to avoid plastic straws and cups, and I like to have fun ones. Plus, now I will likely get more bakery items…I always hated to “waste” 125 points on a cake pop or cookie.
So for everyone who lost their stars because we didn’t reach Gold Status prior to the change we lost everything according to the website and what is written the original post. We were not Grandfathered in. Sucks because my email said I had until 4/28 to reach Gold Status. 🤷🏽♀️
Make sure you double check to make sure your birthday month and day carried over. Mine did not show up, but was easily added.
I’m actually happy that I can use 50 stars to get pastries! And dont have to use 125. My son loves getting their choc chip cookie:) And I usually get soy milk, so now I can just use 25 stars to pay for that extra charge:) This helps me use my stars for more things. That’s just me though! Since I wouldnt use my stars for sandwiches or super pricey drinks like frapps or 10 shot lattes lol 😝
I used up most of my rewards before April 15th with the help of my son in college. I gave him my card and told him to order the the protein lunch or venti frap. He was so happy to save money on lunch!
I don’t go to Starbucks often cause I’m not a coffee drinker but do like their brownies. I had earned 171 stars only to find out today it’s gone. I had no idea this was going to happen. Not sure if customer service can do anything about it.